Posted tagged ‘Trump and violence in Charlottesvile’

(Bannon and Gorka are gone because they agree with President Trump. McMaster and Tillerson, who don’t, remain. Why? — DM)

Tillerson serves in high office at the pleasure of the president, fourth in line to the presidency. There are many things Tillerson could have truthfully said to support the president or at least not to undermine him, particularly in response to a UN committee statement. I’m pretty sure that John Bolton or Nikki Haley would have said them. Tillerson apparently didn’t think he could honorably do so.

If not, it’s time for him to go. I take it that he wants to go. He should get his wish sooner rather than later.

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Secretary of State Rex Tillerson appeared on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace yesterday. Video of the entire 13-minute interview is embedded below. Tillerson made news in one respect that belies his standing in the Trump administration.

Asked about President Trump’s response to the “racial protests in Charlottesville” (at 11:25) and a UN committee statement condemning the response, Tillerson responded in part: “I don’t believe anyone doubts the American people’s values or the commitment of the American government, or the government’s agencies to advancing those values and defending those values.”

Tillerson serves in high office at the pleasure of the president, fourth in line to the presidency. There are many things Tillerson could have truthfully said to support the president or at least not to undermine him, particularly in response to a UN committee statement. I’m pretty sure that John Bolton or Nikki Haley would have said them. Tillerson apparently didn’t think he could honorably do so.

If not, it’s time for him to go. I take it that he wants to go. He should get his wish sooner rather than later.

Over time, the Democrats’ perpetual hysteria will only make them look silly. The biggest thing they have going for them is the timidity of Congressional Republicans. If the Republicans stop reading the Washington Post and the New York Times and get on with the business of governing, the Democrats have no answers on the level of policy.

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Democrats have responded to the tragic events in Charlottesville by obsessively picking apart President Trump’s multiple statements about those events, while steadfastly refusing to admit that the far-left antifas had anything to do with the violence they precipitated, and by demanding the removal of Confederate monuments. A casual consumer of the news might assume that Charlottesville has been a political triumph for Democrats, and a disaster for Trump and the GOP. But the Associated Press now realizes, with evident dismay, that the Democrats may have miscalculated: “Dems risk culture war fight in Charlottesville response.”

…Democratic leaders across multiple states now are pushing to take down Old South monuments like the one that ostensibly sparked the events in Charlottesville, and three rank-and-file House Democrats want to pursue a congressional censure of the president.

In interviews this week before his resignation was announced Friday, White House strategist Steve Bannon gleefully suggested Democrats are falling into a trap.

One of the problems is that the Democrats’ position on Confederate monuments is highly unpopular:

Polls taken after last weekend’s violence offer some evidence backing Bannon’s and Trump’s view. While polls found widespread disgust with white supremacists, a Marist Poll for NPR and PBS found that just 27 percent of adults queried believe Confederate monuments “should be removed because they are offensive.” About two out of three white and Latino respondents said they should remain, as did 44 percent of black respondents.

The AP’s fear is that Democrats’ obsession with President Trump will prevent them from communicating a positive agenda to voters:

Trump upset Democrat Hillary Clinton on the strength of his support from white voters, particularly working-class whites who possessed a combination of economic frustration and racial resentments salved by Trump’s promises of immigration controls, law-and-order and a booming economy.

Clinton, meanwhile, concentrated so much on Trump’s deficiencies and outlandish statements that her own policy proposals received less attention. That’s a problem that has beset Trump rivals since he first declared his candidacy: All the attention focused on Trump — even unflattering stories — prevent them from getting out their own messages.

Overlooked by the AP is the possibility that the Democrats have no messages of their own to communicate. Which reminds me–whatever happened to the Russia collusion story? It was of world-historical significance until it disappeared overnight, succeeded by a new opportunity for Trump-hatred.

Which doesn’t seem to be of much significance to voters. Rasmussen finds that the president’s approval rating hasn’t been significantly affected by the hysterical attacks on him following the violence in Charlottesville:

Despite the media furor over what the president did and did not say following last weekend’s incident in Virginia, his approval ratings appear little changed.

Over time, the Democrats’ perpetual hysteria will only make them look silly. The biggest thing they have going for them is the timidity of Congressional Republicans. If the Republicans stop reading the Washington Post and the New York Times and get on with the business of governing, the Democrats have no answers on the level of policy.

The press had grown accustomed to Republican presidents who suffered under what might be called a conservative inferiority complex. Trump, fortunately, isn’t touched by it and is willing to call the self-appointed ruling class on its propaganda and lies. As phony Republicans and conservatives chase after the mob headed for Lee’s statue, there stands Trump like a stonewall.

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Naturally, the stupid party and its spokesmen desperately want an invite to it.

Out of this week’s orgy of self-righteousness has come toppled statues in the South, a vandalized Lincoln Memorial in the North, a Democratic state senator in the Midwest calling for the assassination of President Trump, and numerous other examples of “progressive” barbarism. It tells you everything you need to know about the rancid condition of “higher education” that the scenes of the greatest irrationality in America today take place in university towns.

In Durham, a cradle of ruling-class liberals at Duke, demonstrators put down their copies of Malcolm X’s memoirs long enough to take off Robert E. Lee’s nose in the school’s chapel. How will Duke respond to this vandalism? By expelling the students? Or by expelling the Lee statue?

Naturally, “conservatives” and members of the stupid party are joining the lynch mob instead of stopping it. By the way, what exactly do “conservatives” conserve anymore? It is difficult to say, except maybe their seats on Meet the Press and Morning Joe. Turn on the TV and you are likely to hear some “conservative” rebuking Trump for his ban on transgendered troops, extolling the glories of gay marriage, and casting Robert E. Lee as a traitorous dirtbag. Rich Lowry wants to see the Confederate monuments “mothballed.”

One wonders what entitles this generation to speak so confidently about past evils given its inability to recognize present ones. Modern America is awash in the blood of millions of aborted children — a monstrous evil we’re told is as central to the modern lifestyle as slavery was to the ancient one.

Can anybody imagine the “conservatives” heard this week lecturing Trump on his comments ever refusing to appear in the company of abortion advocates? No, the Bill Kristols are only too happy to belly up to the smugfests of the pro-abortion liberal elite. They consider their pro-abortion peers very fine people indeed. They will often lecture social conservatives on the need to lighten up and accept the “Big Tent.”

Of course, it is an enormous lie that Trump ever called white nationalists very fine people. He explicitly condemned them. His comment was obviously referring to the non-racist protesters dismayed by the removal of Lee’s statue. Notice that nobody in the press actually quotes Trump’s statement, since that would expose their “reporting” as despicable propaganda worthy of a Soviet show trial.

The fake news has never been faker, as puffed-chest “anchors” instruct their audiences to trust their dishonest paraphrase of Trump’s remarks. And of course here too the “conservative” press joined in the journalistic malpractice. The politically correct weenies at the New York Post, for example, ran outrageously dishonest headlines about Trump calling the white supremacists fine people.

A parade of “conservative” prognosticators and effete Republicans say that this controversy will inflict permanent damage on Trump. Before you take their comments seriously, go back and look at what these cocky jackasses said about Trump’s chances in the Republican primaries. If any of these frauds ever tried to run against Trump, he would crush them. Pundits on stations with anemic ratings, and pols who couldn’t win their own states, claim that they speak for the “country.”

These dolts still don’t get it. Trump won the presidency not in spite of his defiance of conventional wisdom but because of it. And he will win re-election for the same reason. If anything, the hidden Trump vote will increase. Trump’s strength is that he refuses to go wobbly in the face of fashionable lies — a trait no Republican president since Reagan has displayed.

One can only laugh at the fatuousness of the Bushes, who so desperately want to be seen as “enlightened” on matters of race. In what the press reported as an implicit rebuke to Trump, they issued a joint statement on Tuesday from Kennebunkport against “hatred.” I recall George W. Bush saying that one of the most troubling moments of his presidency was when Kanye West accused him of not giving a damn about the stranded people of New Orleans during Hurricane Katrina. That criticism hurt deeply, an anxious Bush acknowledged. Bush’s imprudent decision to invade and occupy Iraq, causing thousands of collateral deaths, didn’t keep him up at night. No, he was worried about the self-indulgent carping of a celebrity rapper. And the fruit doesn’t fall far from the tree. When Bush’s daughter made the utterly minor and innocent mistake of confusing the titles of two black movies, she quickly popped up on the Today show to offer an abject, tears-streaming-down-the-face apology to the black community.

The press had grown accustomed to Republican presidents who suffered under what might be called a conservative inferiority complex. Trump, fortunately, isn’t touched by it and is willing to call the self-appointed ruling class on its propaganda and lies. As phony Republicans and conservatives chase after the mob headed for Lee’s statue, there stands Trump like a stonewall.

No matter that the concrete manifestations of this sin have been mostly reduced to subjective “microagressions” that only the victim can perceive, or statistical “disparities” the numerous causes of which are reduced to one––racism––despite the absence of any evidence that people have consciously or even unconsciously constructed “institutional racism.” The nasty, brutal, widespread racism that once engendered night-riders, lynching, legal segregation, and casual daily violence and humiliation may be gone, but like Jimmy Carter’s adultery, every day all whites sin against blacks “in their hearts,” and enjoy the social order that perpetuates their racism and protects their “white privilege.” Questioning this assumption reveals a stiff-necked indulgence of sin, and a need for public confession and verbal self-flagellation. Hence the heated condemnations of Trump issued by the Republicans, which signaled their acceptance of the narrative and their personal righteousness.

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The blood on the ground in Charlottesville hadn’t dried before the race industry was fulminating full blast, and anxious Republicans were furiously virtue-signaling. Once more we see the toxic wages of our incoherent and politicized racial discourse.

Trump’s general condemnations of the white supremacists and their rally at which a woman was run-over and killed by a loser with a Hitler fetish was insufficient for both sides. Republicans and progressives alike demanded that he call out by name the various fringe-groups that organized the rally. All were outbidding one another to display their righteous indignation and complete freedom from the slightest taint of racism. Ted Cruz’s statement is typical: “The Nazis, the KKK, and white supremacists are repulsive and evil, and all of us have a moral obligation to speak out against the lies, bigotry, anti-Semitism, and hatred that they propagate.” It doesn’t take much bravery to make a statement so obviously true and widely approved outside a tiny fringe movement.

Then followed demands to call the murder “domestic terrorism”; the opening of a DOJ investigation; three days of NeverTrump dudgeon over Trump’s gaffe; and endless progressive analyses of the alt-right and racist moles that have burrowed into Trump’s administration. Long before Charlottesville, the anti-Trump “resistance” had decided he was a crypto-racist issuing “dog whistles” to his knuckle-dragging, gap-toothed base which in Bill Clinton’s day Dems called “angry white men.”

Thus the narrative was set, and any questioning of it considered bad form or even a sign that the critic is a minion of the Imperial Wizard or Grand Cyclops. The endless Two-Minute Hate Whitey was on, and it doesn’t do to interrupt its ritual.

But conclusions should be drawn. First, the eagerness and zeal of many Republicans to put themselves on the side of the angels demonstrate once again how thoroughly they have endorsed the race-hacks’ preposterous and self-serving rules for racial discourse, no matter how incoherent or distorting they are of today’s reality.

For example, both sides agree that “white supremacism” targeted specifically at blacks is a unique evil transcending all others, including anti-Semitism, the on-going jihadist genocide against Christians in the Middle East, or the jihadist terror that slaughtered people in Boston, Orlando, and San Bernardino. Assent to this demand that racism against blacks is the supreme evil––as are all, by the way, reductions of humans to any materialist determinism––is not enough. White racism is America’s original sin from which all other sins derive. But unlike Christianity’s doctrine of the Fall, there is no possibility for redemption. The taint is forever.

No matter that the concrete manifestations of this sin have been mostly reduced to subjective “microagressions” that only the victim can perceive, or statistical “disparities” the numerous causes of which are reduced to one––racism––despite the absence of any evidence that people have consciously or even unconsciously constructed “institutional racism.” The nasty, brutal, widespread racism that once engendered night-riders, lynching, legal segregation, and casual daily violence and humiliation may be gone, but like Jimmy Carter’s adultery, every day all whites sin against blacks “in their hearts,” and enjoy the social order that perpetuates their racism and protects their “white privilege.” Questioning this assumption reveals a stiff-necked indulgence of sin, and a need for public confession and verbal self-flagellation. Hence the heated condemnations of Trump issued by the Republicans, which signaled their acceptance of the narrative and their personal righteousness.

But conservatives who accept that preposterous narrative will never be redeemed. No amount of groveling or rhetorical hair-shirts or preemptive cringing will save them from their endemic racism. They are always and forever racists, because they are ideological opponents of the political aims that the purveyors of the narrative are pursuing––more power to the left, more redistribution of wealth to its clients, more and bigger government to create more socialist cronyism of the sort on which the progressives feed.

The narrative, in other words, is an instrument of political leverage and power, not a description of reality. Identity politics based on grievance and victimization requires that there always be grievances and victims. Progress cannot be admitted, no more than any of us can be born free from Original Sin. The permanence of racial sin, and the need for whites to act in ways that advantage the “victims,” forbid such reconciliation.

Thus the reflexive and hyperbolic condemnations of white racism are instruments of power. If a faction can make people do what it wants them to do to benefit itself, that is power. Campus protestors coercing from the president or administration scholarship money, programs, research centers, and more black-studies faculty hires, is power. Making public officials passionately and anxiously demonstrate their absence of racism is power. Getting the president to issue the specific condemnation that the faction demands is power.

Moreover, success in achieving one demand breeds more demands. So even though Trump specifically called out the alt-right, the KKK, and the neo-Nazis, Nancy Pelosi is now demanding that the president fire advisor Steve Bannon, and thus tacitly confess the important role the racist alt-right played in his election. This is the essence of political correctness: requiring public obeisance to interpretations of political and social disagreements that benefit the left. Political correctness is power.

The wide-spread acceptance of this ideologically skewed racial logic makes justified complaints about a double standard useless. The fringe groups that assembled in Charlottesville are nationally negligible. They are universally despised and shunned. Their national profile is the result of the progressives and the media weaponizing them against Trump. They have no chance whatsoever of amassing enough of a following to win any national public office. As a threat to blacks they are nothing compared to the thousands of black men murdered by other black men every year. But again, the practical consequences of their despised ideology don’t matter. It’s the political use to which their lunatic beliefs can be put.

That is why Trump’s condemnation of “all sides” was scorned. We all know that Black Lives Matter has played a role in the war on cops that contributed to assassinations of police in Texas, Baton Rouge and elsewhere. Some of the assailants said they were “influenced” by BLM rallies, at which chants like “Pigs in a blanket, fry ’em like bacon” or “Dead cops now” are heard. We know that the Antifa bunch are notorious for using violence to shut down talks or protests they don’t like. As the videos show, they came to Charlottesville armed and ready to rumble, as did the supremacists.

But when have we heard Republicans with similar intensity demand that Obama, Loretta Lynch, the NAACP, the Black Congressional Caucus, or any Democrat leaders call out by name these “domestic terrorists”? Indeed, a BLM official was welcomed to Obama’s White House and fulsomely praised. Obama and his AG Eric Holder serially reinforced the despicable lie that the police target innocent black men for murder, the pretext for BLM’s protests. A few Republicans commented on this abuse of public office, but we heard nothing like last week’s vehemence.

And how do the media get away with calling the Antifa protestors vague “counterprotestors,” when video footage shows them fighting with gusto and wielding weapons like staffs or even ignited aerosol spray-cans? How are the supremacists, who had legal permits to hold a rally and exercise of their First Amendment rights, the sole “cause” of the mayhem? Would that woman have died if the Antifa thugs, masters of the old anarchist “propaganda of the deed,” hadn’t infiltrated the protest and fueled the violence, as they have done numerous times across the country?

This isn’t “whataboutism,” the latest rationalization of NeverTrump apologists hiding their double standards. This is about using a consistent standard based on consistent principle, such as violence or murder should never be used to violate any group’s First Amendment rights, a principle that should be applied consistently without exception or rationalization or making some people’s rights or deaths more equal than others’.

Trump and his advisors need to understand how pervasive the left’s racial narrative is, and anticipate it when commenting on events like the Charlottesville killing. Once he has thrown a bone to the identity politics tribunes and fearful Republicans, then he should call out the leftist thugs and demand that their Democrat enablers condemn them by name. And don’t buy into the narrative that historical crimes give the victims’ descendants, no matter how free and privileged, a perpetual weapon to use against their political enemies. That claim is not about justice or morality. It is simply an instrument of political power.

(The views expressed in this post are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of Warsclerotic or its other editors. — DM)

The American Declaration of Independence was written by a vile slave owner, Thomas Jefferson of Virginia. The American Constitution was written, at least in part, by vile racists and other “America Firsters.” They tried, but fortunately failed, to prevent noncitizens from exercising their sacred right to vote in national elections. Both demonic documents must be repealed and we must rejoin England, nay even better the European Union, to signal our virtuous multicultural nature and emphatic rejection of all evil past and present.

Antifa, Black Lives (only) Matter, La Raza, adherents to Islam (the Religion of Peace and tolerance), CAIR, the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas and their other supporters — proponents of truth, justice, and true equality for all — will appreciate our efforts even more than they appreciate the removal of all artifacts of American history associated with our racist Wars for Independence and the Confederacy. To please them even more, we must expunge from our history — and from our minds as well — all residual evil thoughts. This is necessary for us to have freedom of proper speech and proper thought (only), as do the fortunate citizens of China, North Korea, Iran, Venezuela, Cuba and other glorious progressive nations.

The removal of a statue of George Washington — a vile slave owner who led our absurd rebellion against the British Empire — has already been proposed. Memorials to General Robert E. Lee and other racist Confederate terrorists have already been removed, “peacefully.” That’s not enough! We must move forward, ever toward the abyss, until America, as we know and despise her, no longer exists. Then, we will no longer have any basis for appreciating — let alone singing — such alt-right drivel as this:

Surely, no true American patriot could countenance such an abomination. America rightfully belongs to everyone, not just those who were born or already live here, but also to those who want to live here and ply their wholesome trades, safe from racist law enforcement. Welcome MS-13, Sinaloa, and all of the rest. America must become a true land of opportunity for all.

Georgetown University sociology professor Michael Eric Dyson said Wednesday on CNN that the antifa movement is trying to “preserve the fabric of America.”

CNN host Poppy Harlow asked Dyson to respond to President Donald Trump’s comments during a press conference Tuesday on removing Confederate monuments. The president, while addressing criticism of his response to the violence that occurred in Charlottesville, Va. over the weekend, argued that removing Confederate statues erases the country’s history and culture. He wondered if activists will next want to remove monuments to George Washington and Thomas Jefferson because they were slave owners.

“Michael, the president said that we are—about the monuments, about the confederate monuments yesterday—that we are trying to erase, we being the American people, it is trying to erase history, change culture, by taking them down,” Harlow said to Dyson. “That sort of completely ignores the fact that they are representing a sanitized, fictionalized history.”

“What did you make of how the president addressed these monuments yesterday?” she asked.

Dyson gave a long response in which he called Trump “lethally ignorant” and said the history of the Confederacy perpetuates the “mythology of white supremacy.”

“This man is lethally ignorant, incapable of even having a kindergartner’s comprehension of race,” Dyson said. “For those who say look, the Confederacy is about history and heritage, it is. The history and heritage of racism! The history and heritage of bigotry. Building their sense of biological and in many cases theological and national identity upon a lie, a mythology of white supremacy.”

Dyson added that groups like Black Lives Matter and the antifa movement are interested in “preserving the fabric of America.”

“The people that we claim, Black Lives Matter, the antifa movement, and so on, are interested in preserving the fabric of America,” Dyson said. “Mr. Miller says again that there was violence there, but the problem is, to equate that violence in reaction to the bigotry with the bigotry itself is to misunderstand the fact that when you go to cancer treatment, the radiation is tough treatment, but it is meant to remove the cancer.”

Antifa refers to an anti-fascist, leftist movement that sometimes uses violence in protests to further its goals. Over the weekend, antifa protesters assaulted at least two reporters. One antifa group blamed a reporter in Richmond, Va., who had to receive staples in his head at the hospital, for “perpetuating rape culture” because they did not give the journalist consent to film them.

Dyson ended his answer by saying Trump lacks the right moral vision and is the most incompetent president in history.

“So what he fails to understand and what the president especially fails to understand is that you are complicit with the worst currents of bigotry in this country when you try to draw a false equivalence between secessionists, racists, and confederate defenders and bigots and neo Nazis, and African American and white people and others who have defended the rights of this nation to really seek a path of healing beyond the consternation we see now,” Dyson said.

“That’s the problem with this president: he ain’t got the right moral vision; he doesn’t have the right words to express that moral vision and he lacks an understanding of American history,” Dyson continued. “This is the most illiterate, incompetent president in the history of this nation and it shows, and it tells on him in the midst of this racial crisis where he is incapable of showing basic decent compassion for those who are vulnerable and who are victims of white supremacy in this country.”